There are a number of skill based amusement game that use a rotating wheel as a target including those positioned in a horizontal plane. For instance the patent to Halliburton, U.S. Pat. No. 7,507,152 (“the '152 patent”) discloses a game device that have a plurality of targets or holes through the horizontal wheel. The object of the game disclosed in the '152 patent is to time the drop of a ball or game piece so that it intersects with a target hole as it passes directly under the drop location so it falls directly through the rotating wheel and second disk that also has a aperture. If the drop is unsuccessful, the ball will eventually be capture in one of a plurality of holes in the wheel, and is moved to the through hole of the underlying disk and allowed to fall into a ball retention area. The logic of the game can detect when a ball falls directly though the drop area or determine the respective other hole in the wheel. However, this second calculation, namely when the ball is capture in other locations and does not fall directly through the wheel and disk, the location of the ball is not directly calculated but rather, the location is determined by calculating the respective wheel position when the ball sensor detects when the ball is dropped through the disk aperture.
While the game disclosed in the '152 patent has been successful, because the wheel that is designed to capture balls has no sensors built into it, it therefore has no intelligence and the wheel must rotate with the ball in a hole that has been captured with a through hole to finally drop the ball through a though hole in a second disc under the wheel in order to determine discover which hole the was captured ball landed in in order to pay the tickets or points corresponding to the hole location to the player. This configuration creates a time delay and a consequential disconnect from the game play action and feedback to the player. In other words, while a player can observe a particular result, feedback to the player relating to the game conditions, which may include visual, auditory, tactile stimulation of the payout itself is delayed. In addition, in the game disclosed by the '152 patent, the time in which the ball drops from the top of the device to the wheel is relatively rapid, and therefore the player does not have much time to observe the action of the game upon the ball release.